Word: punditing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Curt LeMay is not much of a hand for chitchat. When his aides, in reporting, begin to stray from the subject at hand, Curt is certainly curt: "Stop, you're talking nonsense." Recently subjected to an interview by a Washington pundit who seemed more anxious to make speeches than to ask questions, LeMay interrupted: "If you know all the damned answers, then what are you doing here?" LeMay is as hard-boiled a disciplinarian as exists in the high command of the U.S. armed forces. But he is renowned for backing his men when they make understandable mistakes...
...March 27, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko went to the White House to see Kennedy, principally about Laos. Again the matter of a meeting of the two K.s came up, and Kennedy said he was willing. Two weeks later, Khrushchev took visiting U.S. Pundit Walter Lippmann aside in the garden of a villa in Sochi and confided the news...
Cause to Howl. Pundit Lippmann's cup of wormwood spilled over: "President Kennedy is in grave trouble. If, after the appalling mistake of judgment in the Cuban venture, he allows himself to be sucked into the quicksands of Laos, he will have compromised, perhaps irrevocably, his influence on events." For the architects of failure in Cuba, Lippmann hotly demanded expulsion ("The mistake can be purged and confidence can be restored only by the resignation of the key figures who had the primary responsibility"), and fingered the culprits: "Bissell and Dulles of the CIA, Lemnitzer and Burke of the Joint...
...that Mr. Kennedy has an almost superhuman job on his hands. But he will not win cooperation by alibis attempting to shift responsibility to the press, nor by spending so much of his time at partisan political dinners or in conferences with political bosses." Even New York Herald Tribune Pundit Roscoe Drummond, carefully neutral to Kennedy up to last week, succumbed to angry and italicized vexation: "President Kennedy is certainly saying enough about averting the worst. But he isn't doing enough...
Senior Political Pundit Walter Lippmann found even graver cause for complaint: "The President makes announcements and the correspondents ask him questions in order to get stories, perhaps even scoops. That is, I believe, a basically false conception of why it is worthwhile to have the President submit himself to questions from the press. The real use of the presidential press conference is to enable the President to explain his policies and, if necessary, to compel him to explain them." In this respect, added Columnist Lippmann, the Kennedy conference format has been a failure: "President Kennedy, with all his political genius...